“You were you”: how a doctor unmasked the woman who murdered 3 relatives with poisonous fungi who served them in a lunch

But at first, when Heather and Ian went to the LEONGATHA hospital with intense symptoms similar to those of a gastroenteritis, Dr. Webster and his team thought it was a case of massive food poisoning.

Heather told the doctor that he had spent a “pretty” afternoon at Erin's house, according to Webster in the trial.

“At one point, I asked Heather how was the sirloin and told me it was delicious,” said the doctor.

His suspicions fell on the meat, so he took some blood samples by caution and sent them to be analyzed to a city with better medical facilities, before connecting the Wilkinson to an intravenous probe.

He soon received a call from the doctor who attended Don and Gail at the Dandenong hospital, about 90 minutes by car, and his stomach was stirred.

It wasn't the flesh, they were mushrooms, he said. And his patients were on the verge of an irreversible fall towards death.

Webster immediately changed strategy. A treatment began to try to save their failed livers and prepared to transfer them to a larger hospital where they could receive specialized attention.

Just then, someone touched the hospital entrance bell.

Through a security window, a woman told her that she believed she had gastroenteritis.

“I said:” Wait, what is your name? “And she replied:” Erin Patterson, “says Dr. Webster.

“Then I realized … it was the chef.”

He opened the hospital door and told her that she suspected that she and her guests were suffering from deadly poisoning for poisonous fungi. He asked him about the origin of the fungi he had used in his homemade dish.

“His answer was one word: Woolworths (a renowned supermarket),” he says.

“And suddenly everything fit my head.”

There were two things that convinced him of the guilt of women at that time, he explains.

First, it was an unlikely response. Admitting that he had collected wild fungi, as many inhabitants of the area do, would not have aroused suspicion. To say that they came from a large supermarket chain with strict food safety standards, on the other hand, it was suspicious.

And two, the woman, who is the mother of two children, showed no reaction of concern, despite being a few meters from where Ian and Heather were seriously ill, relatives who, according to her, wanted a lot.

“I don't know if he even noticed that they were there,” he says.

Then, he left Erin with the nurses to make basic checks, and went to see the Wilkinson who left for the Dandenong hospital. Remember to see how they went up to the ambulance to the elderly couple and Heather thanked him for their attention while the vehicle doors closed.

“And I knew,” he says, without finishing the phrase.

“It's quite difficult to talk about it without getting excited.”

“She (Heather) could easily have done the opposite and shout …” Thank you for nothing. “

Maybe that would have been easier to accept than his sincere gratitude, webster adds. “You know, I didn't realize (of poisoning) before.”

But he did not have time to assimilate the seriousness of his last conversation, and hurried to return to the Emergency Room. Then he discovered that Erin had registered against the Doctors Council.

After desperately trying to her cell phone, stunned and worried, Dr. Webster decided to call the police.

“I am Dr. Chris Webster, from the Leongatha Hospital. I am worried about a patient who came, but abandoned the building and could be exposed to a deadly toxin by fungal poisoning,” he can say in the recording of the call, which was reproduced in the trial.

Delight Erin's name to the operator and gives his address.

“Did he get up and left?” They ask him. “It was only here five minutes,” says Webster.

In the trial, Erin said that the information had taken her by surprise, that he had gone home to feed his animals and to make a suitcase, and that he “lay” a while before returning to the hospital.

“After the medical staff told him that he had ingested a potentially mortal poison, isn't it the last thing he would?” Asked the prosecutor in court.

“It may be the last thing you would do, but it is what I did,” said Erin challenging from the stretch of the witnesses.

But before the police arrived at his home, Erin had returned to the hospital for his own will. Dr. Webster tried to convince her to bring her children, who, according to her, had eaten leftovers.

“She worried to be scared,” he said at the trial.

“I told him they could be scared and alive, or dead.”

Erin said before the jury that he was not reluctant, but overwhelmed, and that he believed that the doctor was “screaming.” “Now I know that this is his normal voice,” he added.

Webster finished its turn shortly after. The trial revealed that the medical exams made to Erin and their children did not show signs of poisoning poisoning and, after spending 24 hours in the hospital as a precaution, they were discharged.

Two years later, when the news of the jury verdict came this Monday, Dr. Webster began to tremble.

He was one of the key witnesses of the accusation and had suffered the “weight of expectations.”

“If the scene makes no sense to the jury, if a small piece of the puzzle is out of place, it could alter the entire result of the trial … I really did not want to collapse under the scrutiny.”

He says it is a “relief” to have contributed to Erin Patterson, whom he calls “the definition of evil,” accounts.

“I feel justice was done.”

However, for him, the greatest feeling of resolution came to see Ian Wilkinson, the only patient who survived, for the first time since he fired him with his sick wife in the ambulance.

“That memory of Heather being taken that way, now is completed to see Ian again.”

Subscribe here To our new newsletter to receive every Friday a selection of our best content of the week.

And remember that you can receive notifications in our app. Download the latest version and act.